Y: A Novel (5 page)

I am placed in a home the next day, the sixth child in a four-bed home. I share the
bottom bunk with a smelly girl who wets the bed. None of us belongs to anyone. The
woman who runs the house calls me Samantha, and for a while I think that’s my name.
I teach the smelly girl to pee in the tub with me before bed, and from then on we
are friends. Her mother died while giving birth. The girl plays with my hair at night,
and this is what I remember most of all, the feel of her soft nails on my scalp while
the other children cry in the bunk above us.

II.

t
he man in the back of the car is my father. His brother is at the wheel and my mother
is in the passenger seat, her hand on her belly. Her water has broken and seeps into
the seat, moving in ribbons down her thighs and through the thick, rough cotton of
her oil-stained coveralls. My father’s brother is driving a rusty red ’63 Mercury
Meteor, white hardtop, with red leather bench seats. The body is so dented it looks
like someone beat it with a bat. The heater doesn’t work, and my father grabs the
Mexican blanket that covers the ripped-up backseat and tucks it around my mother’s
shaking shoulders. The odometer doesn’t work either, and my father’s brother judges
his speed by feel. He likes to drive fast. He once took a corner so quickly that the
passenger door sprung open, loosened from its hinges.

Here they are, in this rattletrap classic car on the night I am born: my father, Harrison;
his brother, Dominic; and my mother, Yula. The sun has gone down, and the leather
seats are damp and slick from the cold. Yula’s belly is so big that for the past month
she has been wearing a pair of my father’s grimy coveralls. The material is rough
on her skin. Her teeth chatter, and she shrieks when Dominic hits a pothole. The car
lurches and shakes as they make their way down Mount Finlayson. Yula presses her feet
into the floor to keep from falling forward; the road is steep and the
car has no seat belts. She feels warm tears forming in her eyes and fights to stop
them. She has to stay focused. There is no time for emotion. Dominic presses the accelerator
as far as it will go and the car hiccups into gear, then shoots forward. Yula watches
him out of the corner of her eye. The car is dark; the electrical system doesn’t illuminate
the dash and on this part of the road there are no streetlights. But she can see the
outline of his face. Dominic is a hideous man with a shaved head—in all ways larger
and uglier than Harrison. He has tried to sleep with her twice. He feels her eyes
on his face and turns his head toward her, parts his mouth, and she sees the thick
pink of his tongue rolling over his teeth. His breath is as strong and sweet as bourbon.

There is another passenger in this car: my half brother, Eugene. Swaddled out of sight
in the trunk. My mother prays for the car to go faster. She has been able to manage
her contractions up until this point but feels a sudden deep pain radiate from within
her abdomen and swarm into her belly and around to her back. Her underpants are soaked
and she squirms in the seat to get away from the awful cold wetness. My father puts
his hands on her shoulders and holds her gently. Her body shakes and she vomits down
the front of her coveralls and Dominic, disgusted, floors the accelerator. The wind
rushes past them and my mother slams into the passenger door as the car speeds down
the treacherous road that runs like a serpent through this cold dark night.

Five days before she gives birth to me, my mother kneels at the edge of a flower bed,
pulling weeds. It is late summer and she is eighteen, seven and a half months pregnant.
Her father, Quinn, sits in a deck chair, wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a
pipe. He has a round, chubby face, a white beard that hugs the lower part of his chin
like a stirrup, and a nose that hooks downward. He shouts at Yula’s son, Eugene, as
the little boy runs back and forth, in and around the flower beds. Eugene loves to
chase the neighbor’s wayward chickens or follow the lawn mower when Harrison snakes
and edges it over the grass.

My parents, Yula and Harrison, live together, with my half brother,
Eugene, in a pine cabin on a property adjacent to Goldstream Provincial Park, about
twenty minutes up the Malahat, off Finlayson Arm Road. Two homes face each other on
the property, Mount Finlayson looming behind them: a flat-roofed, cedar-sided structure
with floor-to-ceiling windows, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and the hard lines and
glass of modernism, the interior walls lined with timber beams to remind them that
they were in the woods,
of
the woods—this is the home of my grandfather Quinn, a retired fisherman and amateur
cartoonist, his left arm useless and disfigured from a horrific motorcycle crash;
and Harrison and Yula’s home, about fifty feet toward the stream, a small cabin made
of lodgepole pine, the roof covered on the north side with thick green moss.

Quinn built the cabin for Yula when Eugene was born—she was only sixteen years old—laid
sod and a gravel path to connect the two homes, and planted rosebushes and rhododendrons.
But everything else that surrounds them is wild: giant black cottonwoods and red alder;
the stream rank with dead chum or shimmering with their silver bodies rushing to spawn;
six-hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Tourists poke their heads onto the property if they
get lost or take a wrong turn on a trail, and the neighbor’s dog, Beater, scares the
shit out of them with his low growl. Beater’s owner runs a grow-op. Their other neighbors,
Joel and Edwin, have a scrap yard, and their eleven-acre property is covered with
rusted-out tractors and cars. But who can see it. Out here, who can even see the sky.

“Yula.” Quinn coughs and shakes his one good arm at my half brother. “Get the kid
out of my roses.”

On good days, Quinn and Eugene regard each other as pieces of strange furniture brought
in by Yula to add further clutter to the house. Eugene likens his grandfather to a
bookshelf put in front of a window, blocking all light, and Quinn thinks the boy is
like a footstool pushed carelessly to the center of the room, a booby trap, something
to trip over and skin one’s knee. Whirling around them like a dishcloth after dust
is Yula, who serves them soup and wonders why her father and son can’t see each other
as she sees them.

Today, Eugene is collecting sow bugs. He scoops four, five, six of them into a mason
jar with his little hands and shakes them softly. He wears overalls and red gum boots
and no shirt. His black hair is slicked behind his ears. While Yula pulls up weeds
and throws them into a pile behind her, Eugene runs to the edge of the property, ducks
underneath one of the rhododendron bushes, and smears the messy dead flowers into
the ground with his feet.

Quinn fiddles with his pipe and looks at the sky. The Snowbirds fly over the two houses,
headed toward Dallas Road for some civic celebration. The jets are so loud that he
covers his ears. He taps his foot against the metal rail of the chair, raises his
good hand, and traces one of the contrails with his finger. A bottle of sleeping pills
rests in his pocket, a suicide letter addressed to Yula waiting in an envelope on
his desk.

My grandfather Quinn. How did he get here? In the early sixties, he hopped a freight
train west in search of romance and adventure and ended up on a fishing boat, catching
shellfish, salmon, and halibut off the coast of Vancouver Island. He lived at the
YMCA in Victoria for a few months and then met my grandmother, a woman named Jo, who
let him live in an Airstream trailer at the edge of her property, not far from where
my parents’ pine cabin stands now. Jo and Quinn liked to talk about writing; they
both liked James Thurber. Quinn’s dream was to publish cartoons in
The New Yorker
one day. They read to each other in the evenings on the porch. They went for long
hikes through the forest, and when the trail was wide enough they held hands. Sometimes
the view of Mount Finlayson was so stunning that it was impossible to have a proper
conversation. One or both of them would become mesmerized by the landscape and whatever
point being made was lost. Eventually, Jo sold the Airstream trailer and Quinn moved
into the house.

My grandmother Jo was a small woman—barely five feet tall—bone thin with a long, elegant
neck, her head held slightly forward. She wore her coffee-brown hair cut bluntly at
the chin, and her heavy-lidded eyes burned with intelligence. She had inherited the
property years ago and lived on it, alone, until Quinn came along. She was a peculiar
woman, difficult to classify—Egyptian, people thought, upon first seeing her. In the
mornings, she ran a comb through her hair brusquely and walked through the forest
in a man’s flannel work shirt and corduroy pants, rolled to just above her hiking
boots, a travel mug of coffee steaming in her hand. She had one close friend, Luella,
but aside from her and Quinn, she seemed to want nothing much to do with the world
or its people. “I don’t fit in,” she said, “except out here.”

She was fierce, quick to anger, her temper terrifying and unpredictable, her words
deeply damaging when she wanted them to be. Because she had almost no need for people,
she had no trouble hurting them. It seemed to enlarge her, to give her strength. Quinn
told her she had “poison blood.” Sometimes she got so angry she frothed at the mouth.

When Yula was born, Quinn gave up fishing. Every time a fish looked at him with its
silver eyes, he thought of his new beautiful baby. He’d throw the fish back in the
ocean and sometimes, he said, they’d lie there, floating like buoys. Too dumb to swim
away. When he told this story to Yula, he would get on the floor, roll on his back,
and stare at the ceiling like a corpse. “I’m a fish, I’m a fish,” he’d say.

Jo hated it when he told the fish story, especially when he pretended to be one.

“Your father is a buffoon,” she told her daughter, loud enough for Quinn to hear.
“Don’t marry someone you love. Love makes you stupid, like his stupid fish.”

At night Yula’s ears burned with insults and her mother’s shrill voice banged around
in her head, so loud that she often sat up in bed, expecting Jo to be in the doorway,
ready for another one-sided battle. When she saw that her mother wasn’t there, that
no one
was there, she rehearsed all the horrible things she could say back. But what could
she ever say to hurt this woman as much as this woman hurt her? She did not want to
hurt anyone in this awful way.

Her mother wasn’t always cruel. After a fight, she showered Yula with gifts, stuffed
animals and expensive clothing, and sometimes, when she was feeling lonely or Quinn
was angry with her, she’d climb into bed with Yula, stroke the insides of her ears,
tell her she loved her more than anything else in the world. It was these moments
that Yula lived for.

When the fights between her parents got violent or threatened to, Yula stood between
them, arms outstretched. She pried Quinn off her mother. She jumped on his back and
knocked him to the ground. She ran out of the house and into the woods, and neither
Quinn nor Jo noticed until she returned hours later, knees scraped and shivering.
She memorized every creak in the stairway, every squeak of the floorboards, until
she could float through the house as undetected as a ghost.